There are basically three ways of sending ether from a solidity contract:
- contractAddress.call.value("sent_value")() is the less secure version of all of the possibilities. It opens the door for reentrancy and other attacks. It is usually not proposed to use this contract due to security reasons. However, if you transfer ether for a contract that has a complicated fallback functionality, actually this is the only possibility. If you want to fine-tune the gas price of the executed target logic, it is again the only possibility.
- contractAddress.send("value") sends the value to the address in a way that only 23000 gas is allocated to a possible fallback logic. The call gives back a true or false value depending result of the logic. So it can not really be used at complicated fallback logic.
- contractAddress.transfer("value") sends the value to the address in a way that only 23000 gas is allocated to a possible fallback logic. The call throws an exception if something goes wrong, so it is regarded as a more secure way of transferring values. It can not be used at complicated fallback logic either.
